This study examined students' construction of academic subject identity in a university humanities discipline, English literary studies. In so doing, the study aimed to provide an empirically grounded intervention in current debates on the value of the humanities in higher education. Eight students participated in interviews lasting 15-20 minutes…

This article uses the findings from an empirical study on Hong Kong students' reading practices as collected through face-to-face interviews on major university campuses in Hong Kong to argue for the importance of "affective" and "imaginative" engagement with literary texts if students are to develop an interest in reading.…

Environmental education has been widely promoted in Hong Kong schools since the 1990s. Teachers have a crucial role in educating students to be well-informed, environmentally aware and responsible green citizens. The environmental literacy and tendencies of teachers are seen as having far-reaching influences on the development of environmental…

In earlier work, I proposed that flying faculty teaching, where home institution academics teach for short, intense periods in host countries, could foster transformative professional development. In the present article, I explore this empirically. Using the biographic-narrative-interpretative method, five male academics were interviewed three…

Schools in Hong Kong are concerned about the growing enrolments of students with special educational needs (SEN) and how these students could be included in school guidance. This study examines teachers' narratives of the inclusivity of school guidance. The study was qualitative, being a case study of a Hong Kong secondary school. School documents…

This study focuses on how two teachers working in reduced-size secondary classes of the same grade adapted their pedagogy as a result of a brokered dialogue between myself as researcher and 43 grade 10 students from the teachers' classes. Research was carried out over the course of one academic year. First, students' perspectives on studying in a…

Many Hong Kong schools are concerned about their growing numbers of ethnic minority students. When these students are enrolled in Hong Kong secondary schools, how their cultural diversity is catered for becomes critical. This article examines how teachers narrate the cultural diversity of ethnic minority students, who come from Pakistan, India,…

The life history method, which achieved a prominent position in the Chicago tradition of sociological research in the early 1920s, has been widely adopted for educational inquiries since the 1980s. The power of the life history method in illuminating subjective teacher experiences in social historical contexts has made it "probably the only…

This paper presents a clinical inquiry at how one young male ex-offender described his time in custody, how his time had been constructively spent during detention, and the effect of a detention center order on his offending behavior one year after his discharge. In so doing, it allowed him to talk about his institutionalized experience and to…